


The Lonesome Places

by EverleighBain



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Bad Situations Getting Worse, Dúnedain - Freeform, Survival, dunedain rangers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2020-12-28 09:48:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21134720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EverleighBain/pseuds/EverleighBain
Summary: He is seventeen. He has a knife with the top third broken off, a firesteel, a waterskin frozen solid, and a hunk of flesh gouged from his thigh. For the first time in his life, he is wholly and desperately lost.A survival tale told in drabbles.





	1. I

_A/N: Many thanks to Levade for the continual creative spurring, the beta reading, and the faithful friendship._

* * *

In the city men shake hands and call each other ‘friend’, but it is the lonesome places that tie their hearts together and hearts do not forget.

_-C.M. Russell_

* * *

I

He will put the captain’s wife and the harlot’s baby on Lord Glorfindel’s horse. He feels a vague unease at this, as if he is being irreparably insolent, but he knows not what else to do. She will not stop wailing, and the babe is shivering with cold.

The woodsman’s girl and the other youngsters will have to walk. Walking is the only solution he has for them. The Wild sprawls before them in a great broken waste and a black storm greases the distant spine of the Hithaeglir and three children and one weeping lady look to him and only then does the fear go quiet in their eyes.

He is seventeen. He has a knife with the top third broken off, a firesteel, a waterskin frozen solid, and a hunk of flesh gouged from his thigh. For the first time in his life, he is wholly and desperately lost.

The grey horse stands in its lovely rune-etched livery while he legs Handor’s lady into the saddle. Next he lifts the baby. The lady pulls her hands up and away as if he has presented her with something dead and gangrenous.

“I can’t, I will not carry it! Do not ask it of me!”

He stands there with the whimpering infant lifted high in the air until he starts to feel silly. The babe begins to cry in earnest. He lowers it but holds it away from his body and wishes someone would come and take it from him.

The woodsman’s girl does, finally. She comes to his side, ducking out of her cloak. It is a ratted thing with a hole at the hem. She ties it into a bulky loop and slides back into it. Relieves him of the baby and tucks it into the makeshift sling.

She has a very long neck and very sharp collarbones. Perhaps a few years younger than he. He has not bothered to ask her name.

Do you know where we are?” she asks in a low voice. The other two huddle a short distance away, hoarding one another’s warmth.

He hesitates. Wishes for a moment he was able to lie.

“No.”

She draws a breath. Shifts the baby in the sling, draws it nearer to her. “Do you know where the others are?”

“I know where they were going.” He glances up at the blackening eastern sky. Looks away to the south, where somewhere over long leagues lies the East Road, and beyond it, the Angle and its fertile black soil, to where the starving and uprooted Dúnedain had been fleeing when they had been set upon by brigands. Hunted for days now through the hills.

Handor’s lady is still sniveling. To her he says, “If you will not carry the wean, the youngsters will ride.”

She gathers up the bell-strung reins with a soft and lovely jangle. Holds them to her belly, as if she might wheel the stallion and flee if he tries to talk her down out of the saddle.

“I cannot walk,” she says, and drags her broidered sleeve across her snot-slick upper lip.

His tolerance is raveling; he steps toward her.

“I will carry him,” says the girl. The babe has already nestled and quieted in her tattered sling. “Put Tinu up behind her first, the boy can ride in turn.”

“We will not have to travel far,” says Handor’s lady. “The others, surely they are just beyond the ridge.”

Beyond the ridge lies another, and another beyond that, granite-hewn and glowering, limned in skimming mist. The smell of snow is on the air. The wind slides chanting through the rocks but beneath it lies the white and smothering sound of empty wilderness.

_Let’s hope so_, thinks Halbarad, and pulls his own cloak close around his shoulders.

* * *

_tbc_


	2. Chapter 2

_A/N: All recognizable elements belong to J.R.R Tolkien._

_My thanks, as ever, to Levade._

* * *

II

The storm snarls into the foothills, bringing dusk far sooner than it would have come beneath a clear sky. No gentle sift of snow, but a dervish that pocks their faces like a whirl of flying sand. The grey horse bends its head into the wind and often stops and swings its hindquarters against the stinging sleet, while Handor's lady fights it for dominion, until at last Halbarad takes the reins over its head and leads it on with low entreating words.

The children stumble as they walk. The woodsman's daughter at the rear chivvies them on. He does not want to drive them through the night, knows they will not drive at all if the snow grows deep or the air colder.

Soon it is too dark to see aught but shapes. The little girl begins to cry; the boy on the horse behind the lady begins to cry with her, knowing that his seat on the warm grey rump will have to be relinquished. For a fleet and ghastly moment Halbarad thinks he might join them.

He mills his teeth together and grinds his fist hard against his leg, against the wound beneath its shabby wrap. The pain drives hot talons into his flesh and jolts him from his looming panic. He must not, must not. A precipice he will not climb back over, if he slips and takes the plummet.

A voice. He glances behind and sees the woodsman's daughter there, bent against the buffet of the storm. She wades and struggles up the line and shouts into his ear, "We must stop and make a fire, they will freeze!"

He thinks of the firesteel tucked into his boot and feels furious at the uselessness of it, with no fuel to be found. Anything that might burn is drenched or disappearing under the swift-collecting snow. The wind a thief's hand to snatch away the sparks.

He has heard stories, sitting around the Ranger fires with his father. Stories of men trapped in sudden snowstorms, alone and unprovisioned, freezing slowly in their own skin. His grandfather had told one tale of a man so maddened by the cold he slit the throat of his own horse and opened the belly and climbed inside to wait out the blizzard, warm in a cradle of dripping ribs, the sweetmeats of the horse his only portion for two days.

His eyes go to the dim, looming shape of the grey Elvish stallion.

Quick as a snap of static he knows he could not do it, not if he were freezing solid to the ground. But behind him are children clutching their own bodies and weeping with the cold, the warmth of the horse as they ride in turn their only bastion against numbing despair. The despair he knows unquestionably; it stalks them like a wolf. He has seen and done things on this day of a kind to make his own heart howl with desolation.

He halts in the drifting snow. The breath of the horse is hot on his wrist. He does not wait for the lady to slide off on her own but takes her round the waist and pulls her down. Next the boy. He leaves them standing there, the lady looking sour and bewildered but too miserable to question him.

He leads the horse a short ways away. He does not want the others to overhear his next endeavor, for fear they will take him for a lunatic. Perhaps he has become one in the short span of a day.

But he knows what his father has told him about the steeds of the Elves. He has seen for himself, seen Lord Elrohir speak to his as if it were just another man.

"I am not…" he begins. A complete and utter fool. His wits whipped away on the wind. In the dark he can just see the great gentle eye of the horse gazing out at him from beneath a heavy fall of black snow-dusted forelock. The baby has begun to wail again; he looks at them over his shoulder, the driving snow a sheer curtain between them, the children crouched together in the drifts, the lady standing a pace away with her hands up in her underarms.

"We need your warmth," says Halbarad, turning back. He speaks now in Sindarin, as his people do in benediction or lament. "I cannot make a fire. I know not if you can understand me, damn it all and the swiving storm with it, but there are children here and they will freeze to death before the morning…."

His leg and hands ache. His frozen waterskin sits tucked inside his shirt, and though it has begun to soften it is still a gnawing cold against his breastbone. Only that morning he had dragged the captain of the Rangers and a dead harlot and his best friend across the frozen ground and entombed them one upon the other in the crag of a rocky outcrop, without so much as a cairn to guard their butchered bodies. He is hungry and his feet burn with cold. Beridir's blood is black on his thighs, down the front of his jerkin. He is going to kill the pale-haired man who had led the screaming heathens down upon them.

But first he must survive the night. He must keep his promise to Handor and his promise to a dying whore.

_See them safe, I beg of you. _

"Please," he says again, and takes Lord Glorfindel's stallion by both reins, close beneath the chin. Pulls back towards the brawny chest, the soft responsive mouth giving immediately, bowing the neck in intolerable elegance. With his toe he nudges the nearer pastern, just above the hoof, and speaks a swift and shapeless prayer.

The great grey horse stoops and folds at the knees and tips its weight over into the snow, tranquil as a milkcow, steam rising from its hide and out its nostrils. Halbarad feels lightheaded with this small triumph. For a panicked moment he thinks to hobble it so it cannot rise again, but finds the notion for some reason abhorrent. He scrubs the horse's neck and goes to fetch the others.

* * *

_tbc_


End file.
